Novel of the week

Golden Hill

by Francis Spufford (Scribner, $26)

If Francis Spufford’s “ingenious” first novel is a fair measure, there’s plenty of life left in historical fiction, said Maureen Corrigan in NPR.org. “Classic New York stories are always populated by a grifter or two,” so Golden Hill wastes no time introducing a protagonist we can’t trust: an Englishman named Smith who sails into the city’s harbor in 1746 and promptly presents a bill, ostensibly from London investors, demanding 1,000 pounds. Smith agrees to wait while his bona fides are checked, and the delay affords him a chance, while rumors swirl around him, to explore Manhattan’s taverns, its society dinners, and even its debtors’ prison. A playful withholding of the truth about a book’s hero “can become wearisome if overdone,” said Laura Miller in The New Yorker. But Spufford, a British author who previously wrote only nonfiction, has a knack for balancing drama, droll comedy, and historical detail. He’s made America’s peculiar blend of innocence and atavism his subject, and Golden Hill keeps the theme “forever in its sights,” through both “breakneck chase scenes” and “dark nights of the soul.”